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How to avoid dating jerks

How To Avoid Loving a Jerk

Your own attraction to guys who are jerks has the same core elements of an addiction to alcohol or any other drug: you want to stop but feel like you can't; you . Why You Should Never Act Like Your Date's Therapist (or Try to. How To Avoid Dating A Jerk. While we may not be able to rid the world of jerks, we can definitely rid our lives of jerks. By Amanda Chatel on. So you're going through another breakup with another person who flaked or cheated or couldn't commit, and you're wondering what the hell is.

That investment banker survived just one more date until finally during a phone call when he was asking me to go on a third date, I mentally checked off all the things I would rather be doing than seeing him.

Painting my toenails and sitting and staring at a wall both made the list. We never went out again.

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Those guys populated stretches of my 20s. Some were guilty of small infractions belittling the work I did, critiquing my body, never returning a phone call and others were guilty of large infractions standing me up and lying about standing me up, screaming at me during what had been a civilized discussion, going completely ghost after a couple of months of dating because I neglected to offer him a plate of food.

The thing is inside all of us are less than optimal qualities: We can let those feelings, and others, take over from time to time.

The difference with these guys is they were cultivating those more terrible ways of being. At the time, I would cite other reasons why I liked dating any of these guys.

Stop Dating Assholes

I called that guy who screamed at me, passionate. I called that guy who stood me up and then tried to pretend that I had gotten the day wrong and should really be minding my calendar better, afraid to get hurt. Others were challenging, intellectually stimulating, sexy. I was drawn in by their confidence and stayed through the emotional distance.

Sometimes I was looking for a challenge and believed that somewhere beneath those layers of bravado was a man with whom I could make a life.

I was surrounded by women who also dated their share of assholes. We went on dates with them and talked about their varying degrees of terrible behavior, often with laughter, always with cocktails, and then we usually went back for more.

One of the Asshole Jedi Mind Tricks. All I wanted to tell both of those girlfriends: He slept right next to me like a baby.

5 Ways to Avoid Dating Jerks | Lifestyle

We started the trip home to Seattle the next day, and when he dropped me off at my apartment a few days later, I vowed to never see him again. We dated for another two years.

While I was at his apartment, his sewage overflowed all over the bathroom floor. The tub was filled with six inches of shit. Two days later his landlord finally got back to him and said a plumber was on the way.

Two more days went by. You would think a landlord would want to stop an overflow of human shit from ruining his building as quickly as possible. You can probably see where this is going. I had three days to exit the apartment.

He never called the landlord about his shit-covered bathroom. The man who claimed to love me more than anything left me to live in an apartment overflowing with human shit for almost a week.

Here Is How You Stop Dating Assholes And Start Finding Your Forever Person

And lied to me about it. He knowingly left me in an apartment filled with human shit and told me he had done what he could to fix it, when in fact he had done nothing. But thankfully, this was the last straw. She recommended that I take three months off from dating. That I do not jump into anything too quickly—or anything at all—until I shifted some of my patterns and ways of thinking.